Indigenous Futurisms

Departing from the traditional representations of the colonial past and its aftermath, speculative fiction emerges as a new important trend in the North American Indigenous literary landscape, allowing Native writers to represent decolonial futures. This article focuses on the representations of the future offered by two recent Indigenous speculative novels: Louise Erdrich's "Future Home of the Living God" (2017) and Rebecca Roanhorse's "Trail of Lightning" (2018), in the context of their decolonial potential. The analysis of the selected literary texts pays special attention to the status of women and its revision, as well as to the re-narrativization of space in the face of the anthropogenic climate change, and their significance to Indigenous decolonial project. In order to facilitate the discussion of the Indigenous speculative novels, the article refers to recent theories in Native American studies concerning Indigenous futurism, Native dystopia, and definitions of decolonization.

In relation to my article in Visual Anthropology Review, this set of activities is meant to be a teacher-led pedagogical tool for provoking undergraduates to engage their perceptions of Indigenous futures. It is hoped that this will help to disrupt the ways in which Native peoples have become representationally embedded within Western media and imaginations as anachronistic.

By working from within Indigenous spiritual, cultural, and scientific worldviews and traditions, which entail concepts that have not just been dismissed in mainstream sf, but in the wake of the western Enlightenment generally, Indigenous futurist texts position indigeneity at the heart of both scientific progress and socio-cultural futurity. In sum, Indigenous futurisms indigenize mainstream sf by re-envisioning its tropes and motifs from complex, culture-specific Indigenous perspectives; the historically and still predominately white genre is mobilized from both within and without to push Indigenous peoples from the stereotype-ridden margins to the center of sf and, thus, into futurity.

Indigenous futures are not only vital for Aboriginal people; they also provide valuable insight into global challenges. Building on Indigenous futurisms scholarship on Native science-fiction films, I engage recent Indigenous Australian video projects that draw more subtly on futures to illustrate how and why they articulate generative hope in the postapocalyptic present.

This collection of essays engages the ways in which anthropological understandings of Indigenous media can be expanded and reimagined through a focus on futurity. Throughout, the contributors pose two distinct yet interconnected questions: What does the future of Indigenous media hold? And, how is the future itself being increasingly asserted through Indigenous media production? In a sense, then, the collection serves as both retrospective and opening. We reflect on the history of Indigenous media scholarship in tracing the trajectory of emerging forms and content, while also considering how the future is mobilized as a means for establishing temporal sovereignty in relation to anachronistic pasts. In doing so, we aim to provoke new questions about the histories, politics, and futures of Indigenous self-representation.

"Issues of territory and territorialization are germane to this essay. Its driving question is whether affect theory or theology can ever deterritorialize themselves fully from Western-citationality. Acutely attuned to the impossibility and importance of this challenge, the essay enjoins “sticking with the trouble” (a là Donna Haraway) represented by animisms and their indigenous territories: geographical, intellectual, and spiritual. Weaving together indigenous modes of knowing with feminist science studies, the essay resists the sovereignties of both affect theory and theology. Countering modes of thinking affect and theology that might stake out ground, it instead tracks what each does when they are invoked. It thereby seeks alternate routes for making a world and finds them most fruitfully in indigenous futurism. The essay adumbrates a hope for an animist-affect-theology that would create a storied world necessarily rooted in the colonial past/present but also open to indigenous futures and inclusive of other-than-human meanings."

This short science-fiction story is set exactly six hundred years after Captain Cook’s infamous landing in Botany Bay, which marked the beginning of Aboriginal dispossession. The story inverts the history of Australian colonization, with extraterrestrials invading and settling Earth. I engage parallel events from initial colonial contact through current Indigenous political movements, as well as instances of dehumanization, pandemic disease, and postapocalyptic hope. Inspired by Horace Miner’s (1956) articulation of the Nacirema, I utilize the technique of backward spelling to help students denaturalize anthropological representations of the Other. This exercise in empathy is aimed at encouraging non-Indigenous students to attempt (with great humility) to imagine what it might feel like to experience colonization and subsequent intergenerational trauma.